Puzzles - Chapter Eleven: Chimera

In a well-known short story by H. G. Wells, a mountain climber named Nunez trips
(literally, down an ice slope) into an unknown and isolated valley in the
Peruvian Andes. [1] The valley is extraordinarily beautiful, with “sweet water,
pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that
bore an excellent fruit.” But the villagers are all blind. Nunez takes this as
an opportunity. “In the Country of the Blind,” he tells himself, “the One-Eyed
Man is King.” So he resolves to live with the villagers to explore life as a
king.

Things don’t go quite as he planned. He tries to explain the idea of sight to
the villagers. They don’t understand. He tells them they are “blind.” They don’t
have the word blind. They think he’s just thick. Indeed, as they increasingly
notice the things he can’t do (hear the sound of grass being stepped on, for
example), they increasingly try to control him. He, in turn, becomes
increasingly frustrated. “‘You don’t understand,’ he cried, in a voice that was
meant to be great and resolute, and which broke. ‘You are blind and I can see.
Leave me alone!’”

The villagers don’t leave him alone. Nor do they see (so to speak) the virtue of
his special power. Not even the ultimate target of his affection, a young woman
who to him seems “the most beautiful thing in the whole of creation,”
understands the beauty of sight. Nunez’s description of what he sees “seemed to
her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the
stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a
guilty indulgence.” “She did not believe,” Wells tells us, and “she could only
half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted.”

When Nunez announces his desire to marry his “mysteriously delighted” love, the
father and the village object. “You see, my dear,” her father instructs, “he’s
an idiot. He has delusions. He can’t do anything right.” They take Nunez to the
village doctor.

After a careful examination, the doctor gives his opinion. “His brain is
affected,” he reports.

“What affects it?” the father asks.

“Those queer things that are called the eyes ... are diseased ... in such a way
as to affect his brain.”

The doctor continues: “I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in order
to cure him completely, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical
operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies [the eyes].”

“Thank Heaven for science!” says the father to the doctor. They inform Nunez of
this condition necessary for him to be allowed his bride. (You’ll have to read
the original to learn what happens in the end. I believe in free culture, but
never in giving away the end of a story.)

It sometimes happens that the eggs of twins fuse in the mother’s womb. That
fusion produces a “chimera.” A chimera is a single creature with two sets of
DNA. The DNA in the blood, for example, might be different from the DNA of the
skin. This possibility is an underused plot for murder mysteries. “But the DNA
shows with 100 percent certainty that she was not the person whose blood was at
the scene. ...”

Before I had read about chimeras, I would have said they were impossible. A
single person can’t have two sets of DNA. The very idea of DNA is that it is the
code of an individual. Yet in fact, not only can two individuals have the same
set of DNA (identical twins), but one person can have two different sets of DNA
(a chimera). Our understanding of a “person” should reflect this reality.

The more I work to understand the current struggle over copyright and culture,
which I’ve sometimes called unfairly, and sometimes not unfairly enough, “the
copyright wars,” the more I think we’re dealing with a chimera. For example, in
the battle over the question “What is p2p file sharing?” both sides have it
right, and both sides have it wrong. One side says, “File sharing is just like
two kids taping each others’ records—the sort of thing we’ve been doing for the
last thirty years without any question at all.” That’s true, at least in part.
When I tell my best friend to try out a new CD that I’ve bought, but rather than
just send the CD, I point him to my p2p server, that is, in all relevant
respects, just like what every executive in every recording company no doubt did
as a kid: sharing music.

But the description is also false in part. For when my p2p server is on a p2p
network through which anyone can get access to my music, then sure, my friends
can get access, but it stretches the meaning of “friends” beyond recognition to
say “my ten thousand best friends” can get access. Whether or not sharing my
music with my best friend is what “we have always been allowed to do,” we have
not always been allowed to share music with “our ten thousand best friends.”

Likewise, when the other side says, “File sharing is just like walking into a
Tower Records and taking a CD off the shelf and walking out with it,” that’s
true, at least in part. If, after Lyle Lovett (finally) releases a new album,
rather than buying it, I go to Kazaa and find a free copy to take, that is very
much like stealing a copy from Tower.

But it is not quite stealing from Tower. After all, when I take a CD from Tower
Records, Tower has one less CD to sell. And when I take a CD from Tower Records,
I get a bit of plastic and a cover, and something to show on my shelves. (And,
while we’re at it, we could also note that when I take a CD from Tower Records,
the maximum fine that might be imposed on me, under California law, at least, is
$1,000. According to the RIAA, by contrast, if I download a ten-song CD, I’m
liable for $1,500,000 in damages.)

The point is not that it is as neither side describes. The point is that it is
both—both as the RIAA describes it and as Kazaa describes it. It is a chimera.
And rather than simply denying what the other side asserts, we need to begin to
think about how we should respond to this chimera. What rules should govern it?

We could respond by simply pretending that it is not a chimera. We could, with
the RIAA, decide that every act of file sharing should be a felony. We could
prosecute families for millions of dollars in damages just because file sharing
occurred on a family computer. And we can get universities to monitor all
computer traffic to make sure that no computer is used to commit this crime.
These responses might be extreme, but each of them has either been proposed or
actually implemented. [2]

Alternatively, we could respond to file sharing the way many kids act as though
we’ve responded. We could totally legalize it. Let there be no copyright
liability, either civil or criminal, for making copyrighted content available on
the Net. Make file sharing like gossip: regulated, if at all, by social norms
but not by law.

Either response is possible. I think either would be a mistake. Rather than
embrace one of these two extremes, we should embrace something that recognizes
the truth in both. And while I end this book with a sketch of a system that does
just that, my aim in the next chapter is to show just how awful it would be for
us to adopt the zero-tolerance extreme. I believe either extreme would be
worse than a reasonable alternative. But I believe the zero-tolerance solution
would be the worse of the two extremes.

Yet zero tolerance is increasingly our government’s policy. In the middle of the
chaos that the Internet has created, an extraordinary land grab is occurring.
The law and technology are being shifted to give content holders a kind of
control over our culture that they have never had before. And in this extremism,
many an opportunity for new innovation and new creativity will be lost.

I’m not talking about the opportunities for kids to “steal” music. My focus
instead is the commercial and cultural innovation that this war will also kill.
We have never seen the power to innovate spread so broadly among our citizens,
and we have just begun to see the innovation that this power will unleash. Yet
the Internet has already seen the passing of one cycle of innovation around
technologies to distribute content. The law is responsible for this passing. As
the vice president for global public policy at one of these new innovators,
eMusic.com, put it when criticizing the DMCA’s added protection for copyrighted
material,

“eMusic opposes music piracy. We are a distributor of copyrighted material, and
we want to protect those rights.

“But building a technology fortress that locks in the clout of the major labels
is by no means the only way to protect copyright interests, nor is it
necessarily the best. It is simply too early to answer that question. Market
forces operating naturally may very well produce a totally different industry
model.

“This is a critical point. The choices that industry sectors make with respect
to these systems will in many ways directly shape the market for digital media
and the manner in which digital media are distributed. This in turn will
directly influence the options that are available to consumers, both in terms of
the ease with which they will be able to access digital media and the equipment
that they will require to do so. Poor choices made this early in the game will
retard the growth of this market, hurting everyone’s interests.” [3]

In April 2001, eMusic.com was purchased by Vivendi Universal, one of “the major
labels.” Its position on these matters has now changed.

Reversing our tradition of tolerance now will not merely quash piracy. It will
sacrifice values that are important to this culture, and will kill opportunities
that could be extraordinarily valuable.